There’s an article on searchengineland today about domaining and how Google and Yahoo “make money off a twitter typo domain”. I’m not sure I’m as excited about exposing this travesty of justice as SEL is, but I was curious how much traffic typo domains get:
In my brief research I found facebok.com was by far the biggest winner with twiter.com running a distant second. But their traffic dropped off to a trickle middle of this year. I wonder if facebook themselves or a popular app mistyped a URL somewhere and then fixed it.
Other variations of facebook, twitter, google and myspace didn’t yield much. I entered a high traffic site who’s exact numbers I have access to for comparison and by my estimates facebok.com was getting just under half a million uniques per month. Nothing compared to the real FB, but slapping remnant advertising on there would yield $1000 to $5000 per month. Twiter.com gets around a quarter million uniques per month netting around $500 to $2500 on remnant ads.
Companies in general are ignoring this type of brand abuse. If they once and for all recovered the top 10 .com typo (wwwbrand, mybrand, barnd,etc) then they would stop any serious abuse and would furthermore get the lost traffic, which could be thousands of monthly visits
Christopher Hofman
European Domain Centre
Commented on November 7, 2009 at 5:59 am